Family Book Club 2021-2022: Traveling Through World History

We continued our weekly family book club this year to keep exposing the kids to books they might not otherwise choose to read, and I once again worked to find books that (sort of) matched what we were studying in history and worked well for all three of my kids as far as interest/length/content were concerned. (This year they were in 7th, 6th, and 4th grades by age.)

This year we did a world history overview, so I tried to find books from all over the world in all different periods of history. I browsed book lists and read reviews and tried to find stories that were reasonably authentic and hadn’t aged poorly if they were older books. Some eras in history and parts of the world don’t have as many stories available, so that made for an interesting family conversation, as well. Since I had such a long list, a few of these turned into family read-alouds instead of book club books. Here are the books we read this year and our general opinion of them:

Experiential Science: Flight, Part 2

This is the second installment of our lessons on flight.  You can read about our first portion (which covers the four forces of flight and kites) in this post.

Hot Air Balloons, Airships, and Parachutes

Next in the human flight story is the hot air balloon.  After reading Yasuda’s chapter on hot air balloons, airships, and parachutes, we tried creating our own hot air balloon.  We failed, but it was fun and exciting enough to be worth your effort, even if it doesn’t work.  Though Yasuda offered one option in her book, ‘Love objected to it because it relied on a hair dryer to work; he argued that it would confuse the matter by including blowing air in the process of causing the balloon to rise.  While modern balloonists may use fans to help initially fill their balloons, the blowing air is not the mechanism that causes the balloon to rise.

Hands-On History: Knights and Castles

We just finished an awesome six weeks of studying some really cool topics that my kids wanted to learn more about.  Today I thought I’d share the fun we had studying knights and castles.

Books were a big part of our study, though I tried to include as much hands-on as I possibly could.  (I’ll include a description of how we used the different books below for your perusal, along with a quick-reference list of all our resources at the end.  Our read-aloud stories–featuring King Arthur and Robin Hood–are listed and described at the very bottom of the post, below the reference list.)

hands-on history: ancient mesopotamia – sumer

As we wade through history, I’m doing my best at a regional/chronological progression—a bit like a mastery-spiral approach.  I’m attempting to spend several lessons exploring one particular period of a culture, then circling around to see what surrounding cultures were doing at the same time.  After we circle around a region for a while, touching on the same cultures again and again over time, we can take a break to jump to far-flung regions of the world and see how they were developing during the same time span.  It sounds logical, right?  Well, we’ll see how it goes.

After learning about prehistoric humans and the transition to farming and city life, we moved on to study ancient Sumer.  Here were the highlights of our study:

• Overview
  • We got an overview of Sumerian life and historic contributions by reading in our Usborne Ancient History Encyclopedia.  This University of Chicago interactive website also provides a fun look at life in Ancient Mesopotamia and how archaeologists work.
  • We did some map work and pondered the many contributions of Sumerians using this mom-made worksheet: First Civilization -Sumer.
  • We read Ludmila Zeman’s illustrated version of Gilgamesh to get a glimpse into the lives and beliefs of folks in ancient Sumer.
• Ziggurats
  

  Our ziggurats were very colorful!

  • We did some ziggurat research and reading, primarily by wandering around this website.
  • We pondered ziggurat construction using wooden blocks to show how a ziggurat looked.  We also talked about how cities gradually became raised tells (or tels, as I always saw it before now).
  • We made our own ziggurats out of card stock. If you want to do the same, you’ll need some graduated squares.  (I used my paper cutter to make squares of 8, 6, 4, and 2 inches.  You’ll need to use two sheets of standard-size paper.)  Your budding ruler-user can make a line ¾ inch from the edge of each side.  You’ll slit each corner and fold on the lines to make a ¾ inch high square platform.  (You may want to make your top layer only ½ inch high–like the one on the left–to make the folding easier.)  My kids chose to decorate their papers first—colorful ziggurats are much more exciting.  We simply used tape to hold the corners together and secure one layer to the next.  If you wanted to be really detailed you could add a pair of stair-stringers–only upside-down, fitted into the steps of the ziggurat–with a piece across them to create a ramp on which to draw a gazillion tiny steps going up the side.
• Cuneiform
  • We read about cuneiform. I did a bunch of cuneiform research and condensed my findings into kid-sized bites.  (You can enjoy the fruit of my labor via the link below this section.)  For our first round, we read about cuneiform and inspected the examples of how it changed over time.

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    The kids thought it was pretty fun to translate the cuneiform message.

    We translated cuneiform. I used a cuneiform-style alphabet I found online (on this teacher’s blog) to make a page for the kids to decode.  (This is also included in the PDF packet linked below.  The message reads: “Cuneiform means wedge shaped.  The Sumerians invented writing.”)  To make this a bit simpler because my kids are young, I had each of them decode half of the message.  They thought they were pretty cool, “translating” cuneiform symbols to read the message.

  • We wrote our own cuneiform. Using the cuneiform alphabet sheet from the last activity, each of the kids wrote their name in cuneiform.  Then I had each of them pick three words to depict, creating their own cuneiform-style symbols.  They drew a simple image for each word, changed it to all lines and wedges, turned it sideways, and further simplified it, imitating the real changes to cuneiform writing.  (The worksheet we used is also included in the link below.)

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    Our finished clay tablets and our very-authentic-looking stylus

    We made clay tablets. I was going to have the kids dig up clay in the yard for uber-authenticity, but it happened to be thunderstorming when we got to this lesson, so thankfully I had air-dry clay as a backup.  Since we were also unable to look for sticks to use as styluses, I substituted those no-roll triangle-shaped crayons, which worked respectably.  Each kid chose one or two cuneiform symbols to inscribe on their clay tablet.  It’s harder than it looks to get those lines and wedges—the kids had a hard time remembering to make sure the point of the crayon was down rather than the flat side and understanding how to press the crayon down to make a line without squashing the whole crayon into the clay.  They practiced once or twice before making the final product.

Here’s a PDF of my packet for Cuneiform–background reading, translation, and invention.

hands-on prehistory

In studying history with my young kids, I decided to start with the earliest people.  Stone Age people offered lots of opportunities for hands-on study, which is just what I wanted for history in the early elementary years.  In case you’re looking for ideas, here are our highlights:

Timeline

• Introduction and Overview
  I generated my own 11-page Wall Timeline for the longest wall I had available in our work area. Though I would love to have all years equal in order to show a more accurate perspective on time, it just isn’t practical.  To highlight my scale changes, I used different colors on my timeline for each period.  I then explained to my kids that studying history is like studying the world around us:  things that are near us look much bigger and more detailed than those that are far away, even though we know that if we were to go far away, things would have the same dimensions and level of detail.
• Timelines and Scales
  We made a few of our own timelines—for our day, for our week, for our lives—in order to see how and why you would change the scale of your timeline, and how the scale and scope also determine the types of events you would include.
• Learning about the Past
  Pondering timelines led to a discussion of how we know about history, why we know more about recent years than the ancient past, and what sorts of things we know about the past. At this point, we were ready to dive in…

Art History: Cave Paintings

• Part 1: Ponder and copy images. Try to recreate the way in which animals were drawn primarily using one long curving stroke from the nose all the way to the hind foot.  Look at a map to see where cave paintings have been found.

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  The mud-paint was not only less disgusting to create and work with, it also resulted in a bolder and brighter image.

  Part 2: Consider how paints were made. Folks in the know believe that ancient humans may have first tried paints made of berries and other biomass; when these were found to fade and disintegrate with time, alternatives were sought.  Try making your own paint.  We tried chewing and spitting strawberries and blueberries (yuck!) and also mixed our spit with some red dirt we’d collected.  (My husband questioned this, but I argued that it was a less disgusting binder than urine and less messy than animal fat.)  The saliva worked really well to make a sticky paint—and it seems to last!  We tried the spitting technique to make handprints (both directly from our mouths and from straws dipped in our “paint”) but that didn’t work for us.  We had more success with our fingers and with makeshift stick-paintbrushes.

• Part 3: Try your technique in a cave. This part was most exciting for us.  I used various plastic totes, pieces of cardboard, and furniture—all covered with blankets—to turn our master bedroom into a maze-like cave.  (After all, many cave paintings have been found in hard-to-reach locations deep inside caves.)  The kids had to crawl behind the loveseat, squeeze through the shelves of a bookshelf, slither under the bed, and finally climb over a half-wall and wade through a flooded cavern (our garden tub with an inch of water in the bottom), encountering obstacles and dead-ends along the way.  They ended in our candlelit master closet, in which I’d taped crumpled paper bags on the walls as cave-canvasses.  I provided CrayPas for them to draw with; they seemed a relatively authentic medium without being over messy.  (I certainly didn’t want clumps of spitty sand on my carpet, and I thought even chalk might be a bit too messy.)  While the candlelight art part of this was fun, the highlight was definitely the cave.  The kids crawled around in my room for a long time, eventually rearranging the cave walls.

Hunter-Gatherer Life

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  We made “tooth and bone” necklaces and hunter-gatherer sacks.

  Craft Project: A Gathering Bag
  I purchased animal-print felt at a local craft store for this project. We talked about how folks had to scrape skins, stretch them, and even chew them to make them workable.  Then we discussed how sewing helped people make better clothes and other useful items.  One of our books talked about using a sharp tool to pierce the skin to make sewing easier.  (I used a scissors!)  The kids used yarn to sew their little gathering sack together.

• Craft Project: A Hunter-Gatherer Necklace
  Even hunter-gatherers liked jewelry, apparently, because archaeologists have found quite a few necklaces made of bones and teeth. Make your own using yarn, string, or leather cord with corks, straws, beads, noodles, or anything else you can find that looks somewhat bone- or tooth-like.
• Field Trip: Hunter-Gatherer Diet
  We happen to live near a slew of pecan trees, which made this portion of the lesson simple to execute, though going to an orchard or a you-pick farm could also have worked as an experiential example of the effort needed to keep your family fed.
• Cooking: A Hunter-Gatherer Meal
  Make a meal that a hunter-gatherer might have been able to eat. We used our pecans to top a spinach-and-strawberry salad and paired it with a soup of carrots, lentils, onions, and peppers flavored with chicken bouillon.  While this may not be the most authentic hunter-gatherer meal, you get the general idea—and so did the kids. (Though perhaps I should have done something more bland—all pecans, everyone?—or less filling to make a more accurate point…but at this age, I still wanted full tummies and excitement rather than whining.  This was a more fun meal to prepare.)

Construction Projects

• Stone Age Shelters
  While many folks lived at the mouths of caves, there were other types of dwellings used when caves weren’t available. I sent the kids into the yard to make a Little-sized shelter using whatever materials they could find.  Goobie tried a leaf-and-mud hut and one made of sticks.  Peatie spent a long time testing different building methods with sticks and mud.  He tried to make a mud wall between upright stick posts, attempted to mud-glue sticks upright beside each other, and finally settled on crafting a teepee-style structure made of sticks glued together with mud.
• Stone Age Travel
  Having read about coracles in a couple different places, I asked the kids if they’d like to make one. Instead, they preferred to craft their own water-travel solutions.  They discovered several solutions for water transit using natural materials (blocks of wood) or stand-ins (a plastic bag in lieu of an animal skin).

Transition to Farming

• Research: Catal Huyuk (and Jericho)
  I intended to do some wandering around on the Science Museum of Minnesota’s page on the ancient city of Catal Huyuk; unfortunately, I couldn’t for the life of me get the site to work the night before I was going to teach it (though I could pull up random parts of the site through the Wayback Machine). Instead, I did some quick research on Catal Huyuk and Jericho and did my own nonfiction summary for comprehension work.  (Then, of course, my printer wouldn’t work, so we all gathered around the computer to read it the next day. You can use my last-minute work here, if you’d like: The First Towns)
• Project: Clay Balls
  Archaeologists at Catal Huyuk have found scads of clay balls, and they have no idea what they were for. We read about them, guessed what they might have been used for, and then used this opportunity to make our own clay balls.  We gathered two different types of soil, and each child made four balls: one was set in the sun, one was left in the shade, one was baked at a low temperature, and one was baked at a high temperature.  The method of drying didn’t seem to have as much effect on our clay as the soil itself.  We’re hoping to use this knowledge to make some tiny clay bricks for future building projects.
• Map Work and Reporting
  To complete this portion of our learning, I created a regional map for the kids to fill in and included space for them to record why folks first started settling in towns and what they had learned about Jericho and Catal Huyuk. This worked better than the more open-ended, write-whatever-you-learned approach I’d used for science.  Having a few specific important details to recall and then having space to record what was most striking to them gave us a more concise, complete, and comprehensible page for our learning books.  (This was the page I created: First Towns and Cities)

Books We Used

• Adventures in the Ice Age (Linda Bailey)
• Hands-On History: Stone Age (Charlotte Hurdman)
• A Little History of the World (EH Gombrich)
• Mammoths on the Move (Lisa Wheeler)
• Usborne Book of Living Long Ago